Unless you have somehow jerry-rigged a way to make your smartphone or tablet’s battery last all day and tied the device around your wrist, chances are that the device spends more time in your pocket or on the coffee table than in your hands. These large, high-resolution, ultra-connected displays are just lying dormant and waiting to be unlocked. Familiar thinks that it can be the company to bring those screens back to life — and, fittingly enough, it’s relying on a screen-saver to do it.

“There are millions of connected screens that are coming online that have broadband connections and are dark a good portion of the time. I think there’s a huge opportunity to bring those screens to life with the right kind of informative content,” says Familiar CEO Marcus Womack. “We think memories are a good way to start that.”

Billing itself as “the 21st century photo frame,” Familiar is today updating its applications and service with new personalization features and the ability to display video. Using the app allows you to see a slideshow of those videos and photos that you’ve uploaded from your camera roll or given Familiar access to from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and Instagram. (The ability to import Instagram videos should debut in a future update.) The company is debuting this new version on the iPad, and intends to bring similar features to Android in the coming weeks — an iPhone app and website are also available.

Familiar, as a company, isn’t likely to turn any heads. Screen-savers, even “connected” or “smart” ones, stopped being even mildly exciting around the time people started realizing that Nickelback wasn’t going to go away. Despite all this, however, Womack says that Familiar users have some 100 million photos roll across their displays each month. And 40 percent of those users will see a photo, grab their device, and interact with Familiar in some way, emerging from the depths of passive viewership and bestowing upon Familiar the ever-lauded “engagement” metric.

“We see the passive experience as a way to engage people and bring them back in to a rich experience,” Womack says. “It’s also, frankly, just a great way to delight people. If I were walking by the TV, for example, and saw a quick 10-second snippet of my son feeding an animal at the zoo, it’s just a great way to delight me as I go about my day.”

So many of us are surrounded by more screens than ever. There’s the television. There’s the smartphone and tablet. There’s the laptop. Familiar is hoping that the proliferation of displays, in conjunction with the floods of content we’re sharing through social networks and the high-speed connections that make it easier to retrive those photos and videos, will allow it to revive the screen-saver. These devices are already calling for our attention when we turn them on or hear them buzz in the other room — might as well try to make ‘em vie for our attention when they’re not in use, right?

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]